Kazuo Ishiguro's Arthurian Epic, The Buried Giant

At his best, Kazuo Ishiguro is a stalker of dragons, hunting down the beasts of genre, one by one, and emerging with something fresh and heartbreaking. Ishiguro won the 1989 Man Booker Prize for turning manor-house drama inside out in The Remains of the Day, and in 2005's Never Let Me Go he spun a hammy sci-fi premise—clones raised for their organs—into a haunting yarn of adolescent love. And then, for a decade, he published only a book of short stories, all the while wrestling a dragon long unseen.

Now, finally, comes The Buried Giant, his seventh novel, a postmodern Arthurian adventure complete with—yes—an actual dragon. The story, which follows several characters on overlapping medieval English quests, hinges on the connection between memory and vengeance, forgetting and forgiveness. And the result is an engrossing battle, with technical flourishes that cut to the bone—more propulsive than Never Let Me Go, though not as fully realized.

Ishiguro has said he struggled with the dialogue, and a Tolkienesque stiffness still infects the spoken language (though not the evocative narration). The ending, which pivots from dragon-fighting to a final confrontation between the central couple and their past, turns a cutesy twist into a devastating emotional coda. But Ishiguro's victory over medieval melodrama isn't decisive. The dragon is bloodied but still stalks the earth. Let's call it a draw.

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